Authors: Cora Carmack
“Um . . .
what
is happening right now?”
Mrs. M released me and I stepped away from her and the turkey. Max stood at the end of the hallway. I guess she decided against the shower. Her choppy red hair was styled calmer than I had ever seen it. She was wearing a turtleneck sweater that covered her multitude of tattoos. She was wearing less makeup, too. She looked like herself, still, but at maybe 25 percent of her normal vibrancy.
I missed the real her.
“Oh, nothing, dear,” Max’s mom said. “Cade just told me about his parents.”
“Right. His parents,” Max said. She shot me a wide-eyed look.
So, I changed the subject. “Mrs. Miller, tell me what Max was like as a child.”
Max groaned. Her mother practically cheered.
“I just happen to have baby pictures with me! I keep a photo album with me at all times.” Max stalked into the kitchen and threw herself down on the stool beside me.
“Yay. Baby pictures. What a great idea,
sweetheart.
” She laced her fingers with mine, and then lightly dug her fingernails into the back of my hand in warning. All I could think about was what it would feel like to have her fingernails dig into my skin under different circumstances.
I pulled her hand up to my mouth, and kissed the back. Her eyes widened, and she sucked in a breath. I smiled evilly and said, “Oh,
honey,
you can’t blame me for wanting to see your baby pictures.”
While her mother was distracted in the living room finding the album, Max leaned into my ear and said, “You bet your ass I c fingernails scrapeing himm,an blame you. You’re not funny, Golden Boy.”
“Really? I thought it was hysterical.”
“Later, when we’re alone—”
“—I like the sound of that.”
She laughed loudly in the direction of the living room, totally fake, and then turned on me. “Don’t think I won’t murder you, pretty boy.”
“So, I was golden and now I’m pretty?”
She took another deep inhale, and I imagined she was counting to keep her anger under control. I liked her like this. With her cheeks pink and her eyes sparkling, she looked like herself despite the major style change.
“I can’t help it. It’s just so much fun to get you riled up.”
“You really want to play that game?”
“Here we go!” Her mother flitted into the room and slid the album in front of us.
The first picture was of the day they brought Max home from the hospital. The nursery was a mishmash of different pinks and had
MACKENZIE
painted across one wall. Max looked like most babies—small with a pink, pinched face, and no hair. Mrs. Miller had fluffy, curled bangs and looked like something out of
I Love the ’80s.
“Mrs. Miller, I have to say, you don’t look a day older now than you did then.”
She giggled, and swatted me on the shoulder. “Oh, stop.”
Max untangled her hand from mine and said under her breath, “Really, please stop.”
Max took control of the album and flipped through the book quickly, giving me barely any time to look at the pictures, but one thing was obvious. Max’s parents never let her be herself when she was younger. They dressed her in pink, frilly things that you could tell she didn’t like. Her hair was blond and always curled in perfect ringlets.
I leaned into her ear and whispered, “You’re naturally blond? It’s getting easier every minute to picture you in that cheer uniform.” If looks could take physical form, the one she gave me would have been a bitch slap.
She looked picture-perfect in every photo. Like a Barbie doll, and her smile in each was just as plastic. She was beautiful, but sad. She flipped the page, and I was treated to the real Cheerleader Max mid toe-touch.
“And now I no longer have to picture it.”
Her glare stayed firmly in place, but her lips curled up at the end slightly.
“Did you play sports?” Mrs. Miller asked me.
“I did, yes. Football and basketball.”
Max paused in turning the page and said, “Really?”
“I did grow up in Texas. Plus, I was good at it.”
She laughed. “Of course you were.”
“I bet you were a great cheerleader.”
“Great? Not really. Nearly homicidal? Sure.”
I got to see her in a bubblegum pink prom dress and graduation robes. We were approaching the end of the book, and I kept waiting for a more recent picture of her with her new, non-Barbie look. To actuheal sex had bee
Max
I
didn’t know whether to scream or cry, throw things or collapse to the ground. There was something about my mother that made me feel fourteen and pissed off all over again. I hated it, but I couldn’t seem to turn it off either. She just couldn’t ever leave it alone.
I didn’t need pictures of Alex all over the place to remember her. I saw her on the subway, at concerts, passing me in the street. I saw her when I closed my eyes. I used to see her when I looked in the mirror, before I’d changed my hair and inked my skin. I could see her reflected in Mom’s eyes every time she looked at me, like if she just wished hard enough she could make us trade places and get the good daughter back.
It didn’t matter how many times I said it, Mom always tried to make the holidays about Alex. She wanted to talk about the time Alexandria did this or when she said that. Mom brought her up so much that she was like this phantom sitting there at the dinner table that sucked all of the happiness and all the normal conversation into the realm of nonexistence with her.
Forget wishing I were dead. Mom made me feel that way already. Hell, she already had the photo album ready to show the world her other blond princess, never mind that I hadn’t been that girl in a long time. No one wanted to see pictures of this Max. Just Mackenzie.
What was wrong with letting the past stay the past? Why did we have to drag all our issues with us into the future? I couldn’t breathe out there for all the ghosts Mom hauled in with her. I didn’t fit in that world, and the fingernails scrapeshoowI wondered if more I tried, the more I felt like I didn’t fit
anywhere
.
I was lying on my bed, my face pressed into a pillow when I felt the mattress dip. I knew it had to be Cade. Mom never followed me after fights, easier to pretend they weren’t happening. And Dad steered clear of all things that involved emotion. I pulled myself up on my elbows and looked over my shoulder to see him seated gingerly on the very edge of my mattress. He’d left several feet between us.
I rolled over onto my back and waited for him to say something. To ask questions.
He didn’t. He lay down beside me, still careful to keep a buffer zone between us. He put one forearm behind his head, and stared up at the ceiling in silence. This close I could see how broad his shoulders were. I mean, I’d felt them, but I hadn’t gotten a chance to really
look
at him. His arms were muscular and his chest wide. I watched the way his body moved as he inhaled and exhaled. The rhythm was calming.
Watching his chest rise and fall was soothing enough that my anger just kind of drifted away. His eyes were closed and his face relaxed when he said, “I let people go.”
I sat up on my elbow and looked at him, but his eyes remained closed.
“Um . . . if you’re referencing the Bible and that whole let-my-people-go thing . . . I’m not getting the connection.”
One side of his mouth quirked up, and he sighed.
“Last night you asked why I didn’t fight for the girl from the song. It’s because I let people go.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but I approved, as long as we didn’t have to talk about me.
“Always?”
“These days, yeah. When I was younger, I fought and lost too many times.”
I wanted him to open his eyes and look at me. This somber, closed-off Cade was disconcerting. I was in a dark enough place by myself, and seeing him like this pushed me even deeper. I never knew what to do in situations like this, so I decided to take his lead and stay silent.
I wasn’t thinking about the attraction between us. I was only thinking about comforting him when I slid closer and laid my head on his chest.
Maybe I was thinking of comfort for myself, too.
After a few seconds, the arm he’d had beneath his head came down around me. His fingertips rested on my hip, and I released a breath I’d been holding captive.
Just when I’d settled into the silence and the comfort of our closeness, he said, “My first memory of my dad is of him leaving. I was five and I asked him not to go. I begged him actually.” He breathed out in something that was almost a laugh . . . a sad one anyway. “He was gone by morning. My mom died less than a year later.” He closed his eyes, and I could tell he was somewhere else. He wasn’t with me anymore. “She had cancer, and it was like she just . . . stopped fighting. I wasn’t enough to make her want to stay.”
The grief came out of nowhere and knocked me sideways. Tears pressed at my eyes, and my throat burned with the effort of fighting down the emotions. I hadn’t cried in a long time, but the thought of Cade as a child, probably just as good and perfect as he is now, facing those things . . . it hurt. I was used to turning a blind eye to my own@Go drink emotions. I was so practiced in the art that it came easily. But I’d never had to worry about anyone else’s. I’d never been close enough to someone for it to matter. It took all of my self-control to push the emotions back behind my walls.
There were so many things to say that sat just on the edge of my tongue. But all of them seemed like too little and too much at the same time. So, I just held him tighter, and kept my eyes closed until the tears passed.
He laughed, but it wasn’t the laugh that I was used to hearing, the one that turned all eyes toward him. This laugh was bitter and broken.
“When my dad came home for the funeral, I assumed he would take me with him. I imagined what my room would be like in his new house. I stressed about whether or not his new girlfriend would like me. I was so determined to make it work that time. But he left then, too, and I went to live with my grandma.”
I listened to his heartbeat beneath my ear, and all I could think was—how much of a dick do you have to be to leave your kid even after he loses his mother? I’d never been any good at holding my tongue, and now was no exception.
I said, “At least we know douchebaggery isn’t hereditary.”
I was seconds away from suggesting a road trip to find his father and put the bastard in his place. His hand smoothed up and down my spine like he was comforting me, instead of the other way around.
Then I realized . . . he was.
A lot of things pissed me off about my parents and about Alex’s death, but nothing upset me more than the fact that I felt alone in my pain. I mean, I knew my parents missed her. I knew they thought about her constantly, but it was with this happy kind of sadness that was completely foreign to me. When I thought about Alex, it was pure, undiluted pain. It felt like my insides had been rearranged, like I still had internal trauma from the wreck. All these years later, just the image behind my closed eyes of her was enough to make me feel like I was bleeding out. I couldn’t understand why everyone else didn’t feel this way, and it made me furious.
But I could tell from the way the muscles of Cade’s chest and stomach flexed below me . . . he felt it, too. I did the same thing—flexed the muscles of my body like armor. Tendons and tissue were the only things keeping the mess inside me at bay. The only thing worse than feeling this way was putting all those emotions on display for the world to see.
For the first time in a long time, maybe since Alex, I didn’t feel so alone.
I took a deep breath and said, “My sister died.”
The hand on my back slid up into my hair. Any other time that would have sent my hormones into a rave, but now it was just soft and sweet, and it flipped a switch in the back of my mind that I spent most of my days trying to turn off.
The vision of that day in my mind never wavered or faded. It was as vivid today as it was then. When I let the memories get the best of me, I could almost imagine the blinding headlights, the sound of glass shattering, and the pressure of the seat belt cutting into my neck. I squeezed my eyes shut.
I couldn’t hold back the images, but I could hold back the tears.
Cade didn’t try to make me talk. He didn’t ask questions. His touch remained firm and constant, keeping me tethered here in the present. We lay there, wound together so tightly that I didn’t have to keep my muscles tense. I didn’t need the armor@Go drink because he was holding me together.
After what could have been an eternity or a few seconds, Cade whispered, “Pain changes us. Mine made me want to be perfect, so that no one would ever want to leave me again.”
I inhaled deeply. “Yours made you Golden. Mine just made me angry.”
Cade
A
bright light flashed on the other side of my closed eyelids. Groggily, I went to rub my eyes, but something had my left arm pinned to the bed.
A woman stood over me with a camera in her hand. Black spots flooded my vision, and it took me a few moments before I remembered where I was and what I was doing here. The woman with the camera was Mrs. Miller, and she’d just taken a picture of Max sound asleep on my arm. There was a little wet spot on my sweater from her drool.
God, I wanted a copy of that picture.
Mrs. Miller held a finger to her lips and whispered, “I’m sorry. The two of you just looked so sweet that I couldn’t resist.” This was officially the weirdest day of my existence. “Dinner is ready. Mick and I will wait for you two to get freshened up.”
She tiptoed out of the room and closed the door on her way out.
Time to wake the sleeping dragon.
In sleep, Max looked younger, softer. She had long eyelashes fingernails scrapenit">FINDING IT that rested against her cheeks. Her nose was small and turned up slightly at the end. Even sleeping, she had the sexiest lips I had ever seen. Full and slightly puckered, it was like they were calling to me. And I couldn’t stop thinking about her saying she wasn’t sorry I kissed her.